


Disillusionment

by Wildlyandrogynoustiger



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: 21 year old lily, 21 year old severus snape, Complicated Relationships, F/M, Gen, Harry is dead, Living Together, Natural progression of a relationship, Slow Burn, lily is obliviated, more characters will come in as time goes on, only the first two chapters have fucked up formatting now, rating is probably not going to change, remorseful snape becomes even more remorseful, the first wizarding war, there's a lot of grief, they have to confront their past and feelings and their relationship develops over time, they're both really fucked up emotionally, who am i kidding this is angst
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-23
Updated: 2019-03-10
Packaged: 2019-10-14 22:45:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 19,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17517236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wildlyandrogynoustiger/pseuds/Wildlyandrogynoustiger
Summary: There was a sudden stilling in the figures standing and sitting around him.  And then an even stranger thing happened, an amused smile quirked up the ends of Voldemort’s lips.  He paused for a moment and then said “she’s Lily Evans, Severus.” A cold vice gripped his chest.  He thought of blank white pieces of parchment.  Voldemort went on, “I brought her here for you.  You desired her did you not?  Asked me specifically to spare her?” Their eyes met.





	1. Prologue

His emotions clear and mind blank, Severus Snape swept into the large drawing room of the Lestrange’s estate. About twenty heads scattered around the dimly lit room lifted at the sound of his entrance.

“Ah, Severus, you’re late,” came the cold, high voice of Voldemort in the high back armchair by the fire. Severus noted the supine figure hovering in the middle of the couches and chairs, a woman he guessed from the length of the hair falling from the head.

 “Apologies, my Lord,” Snape said stepping farther into the room. The identity of the floating body was still indiscernible in the darkness of the cavernous room, “who’s our guest?”

There was a sudden stilling in the figures standing and sitting around him. And then an even stranger thing happened, an amused smile quirked up the ends of Voldemort’s lips. He paused for a moment and then said “she’s Lily Evans, Severus.” A cold vice gripped his chest. He thought of blank white pieces of parchment. Voldemort went on, “I brought her here for you. You desired her did you not? Asked me specifically to spare her?” Their eyes met.

“My lord,” breathed Snape, “I...I thank you.”

“Severus, here, did not believe I would really do it, though I told him I would,” Voldemort said in a louder voice, looking around at the rest of the Death Eaters. The ghost of his amusement still playing on his lips. “Lord Voldemort rewards those who are faithful to him, beyond even their wildest dreams.” Snape forced his gratitude from where it had sunken in his stomach up and into his mind, letting it swirl and pour from his mind toward his Lord’s.

“So James Potter and their son…?” Snaped asked.

“Dead,” hissed Bellatrix, unable to suppress a delighted giggle.

Snape looked at her. “What’s more, there’s no reason, Severus, to worry about Dear Lily’s blood-traitor husband and brat son. I’ve modified her memory," said Voldemort, his voice light, still amused. Snape fixed his black eyes on Voldemort again, the chill reaching even deeper inside him. He carefully fixed his mind on the things he hated about James Potter. “I know how much you desire to mate with her, Severus. I thought this would make her much more pliable.” Tittering echoed in the cavernous hall.

 Snape tried to match the amused grins surrounding him, but only succeeded in relaxing the tightness in his lips. “Again, my Lord, you have my utmost thanks. This is truly a gift I do not deserve,” this time he managed a breathlessness in his voice that sounded convincing.

“Ah, but you do, Severus,” Voldemort flicked his wand and Lily’s body started moving slowly towards Snape, “you’re the one who told me of the prophecy. Take her,” he instructed. Snape held out his arms and Lily’s body came to rest in them. Her eyes were closed, face serene, long red hair streaming down towards the floor. “I expected you’re eager to enjoy her at last. Go now. You’re excused from this meeting.”

“But my Lord-”

“Don’t be ungrateful now, Severus, the Dark Lord’s excused you,” Bella hissed. Snape stood for a moment amongst the silent group. Voldemort had turned to pet Nagini, apparently uninterested in speaking further. Turning on his heel, Snape strode back out into the garden. He pushed the rising bile in his throat down until he had apparated home to Spinner’s End where he could safely allow himself to feel the horror of what had happened.


	2. One-First Contact

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry that the formating is weird; I don't really understand how to do it yet, but I promise the rest of the chapters will be better.

He set Lilly gently onto the couch in the small, decrepit drawing room filled to bursting with books and bookshelves. How best to contact Dumbledore? A patronus? Then he heard the faint buzzing in his ear which meant one of his security spells around the house had been triggered. He strode quickly to the door, wrenching it open, wand raised. Dumbledore in blue, starry robes stood on the pavement before his house, serene as ever behind his half-moon spectacles.  
“You heard.”  
“Is she here?”  
Snape stepped back and motioned him in, taking a few minutes to look up and down the street before closing the door. Inside, Dumbledore stood by the sofa, gazing down at the unconscious Lilly. Snape collapsed into an armchair, his head in his hands.  
“So he did spare her after all,” Dumbledore said softly.  
“Yes, but he...he...” Snape choked on some overwhelming emotion and simply motioned towards Lilly.  
“Mercilessly killed her husband and child instead. I didn’t think Voldemort recognized that there are things worse than death. Perhaps I was wrong.”  
“He-he thinks it’s funny,” Snape spat with sudden venom.  
“Ah.” Dumbledore said simply. He looked up from Lily towards Snape. “He saw a way to simultaneously earn your gratitude and test you. The fact that it would entail the psychological torture of a muggle-born witch was, as they say, the cherry on top.” His voice lowered, “We would be fools to assume that he does not eventually plan to kill her, after you’ve had your fill of her of course.” Snape moaned miserably in response.  
“What must be done now, Severus, is to think of Lily’s safety. This is a tricky matter. Tom Riddle, I presume, expects you to keep her imprisoned here. There’s no way you would be able to keep a powerful witch imprisoned in your office at Hogwarts without my detection. Hogwarts would be safest for her, but for the sake of keeping your true loyalty hidden we must pretend to do what he expects. I believe it’s perfectly safe to keep her here for now, this house is well-protected. Perhaps the Order could orchestrate a faux raid of some sort to free her in a few weeks. Otherwise, when you refuse to hand her back over to him, the game will be up.”  
Snape had lifted his face from his hands to gaze miserably back at Dumbledore. “He took her memory,” he croaked “Did you know that?” Consternation briefly flitted across Dumbledore’s face. He turned back to look at Lily.  
There was silence for a few moments. “Perhaps that’s best for now,” Dumbledore said so quietly Snape barely heard it. He then turned sharply back to Snape, his blue eyes piercing, “Do you agree?”  
Snape opened and closed his mouth a few times, speechless, uncertain.  
“A horrible fate to know and feel nothing for the ones a person holds most dear. But perhaps an even worse fate is to truly feel the sting of having the people one loves most in the world irrevocably stolen away.”  
“She deserves to know,” Snape replied in a thick whisper.  
“Yes, she will know. She should be the one to decide, don’t you think? Whether to have the memory of love of her husband and child back or to live in blissful, happy ignorance?”  
Snape’s eyes fixed onto Lily’s limp form. He nodded mutely. Dumbledore tapped his wand to Lily’s temple and strode towards the door. He opened it, “I’ll be going now, Halloween feast and all that” and disappeared into the night. But Snape barely noticed, he was crouching beside the sofa, watching Lily’s eyes flutter open.

Lily squinted, struggling to lift her eyelids. She brought her arm up as if to shut out the light even though the room was very dim. “Where…?” she moved her head and saw Snape’s black head hovering over hers. “Sev?” Feebly, she half lifted her hand towards him. He paused for a moment, staring at it like it was a snake that might bite him before reverentially taking it into his own. Only then did he meet her eyes, attempting to school his stricken features into serene blankness. “I...don’t...where I am?” a faint line appeared appeared between her contracted eyebrows.  
“My house on Spinner’s End. You remember. Cokeworth.”  
“I don’t understand…” she trailed off casting her eyes around the room as much as she could without moving her head. “It’s different,” she breathed. She turned back to him, “Where’s my mum? And my dad? What about Tuney?” louder and faster now, “I don’t understand why I’m here. Where’s my mum?”  
He had forgotten her parents were dead as well. Bile rose in throat again; she had at lost at least the last couple years. “Abroad, I believe.” he had lowered his gaze to their hands clenched together, unable to look at her anymore. The desire to shield her from the pain of loss flared up inside him, traitorously warring against his conviction that she ought to know the truth about her own life.  
“Sev, is something wrong? Why are you acting like someone’s died or something?” She was sitting up now, brows furrowed staring down at him. He paled at that, lowering his head even more. There was quiet for a moment. “You look different too,” she murmured into the stillness. She looked around again now that she was sitting up, taking the room in more fully. “Ha-has someone died?” and then, as if struck by another thought, “Why are my parents abroad? Are they on holiday?”  
“Not on holiday, no,” he tried to meet her gaze again but could not. He stared at the dust on the carpet again, mind frantic. How best to explain? He was suddenly angry with Dumbledore for leaving this part to him, for making the task of breaking her his job. Her dark red hair streamed down, splayed across her yellow jumper. Such an ordinary non-descript jumper. He had the remote realization that she had probably seen her husband and child murdered in that jumper. She was still sitting hunched on his couch, concerned yet still somehow calm.  
His black eyes steadily met her green eyes this time, “What’s the last thing you remember doing?”  
Her frown of confusion slowly morphed into one of alarm. “I dunno. I don’t remember summer break, so it’s still term. I don’t have any memories of final exams, maybe that’s just because N.E.W.T.S. are next year. But I can’t think of anything specific, not the last class I went to or breakfast this morning. There’s this haze-” she gestured towards her head and then stopped. Her lips parted and eyes widened. Snape couldn’t ignore the horror in her sudden exhalation of breath, “No. A memory charm?” Her eyes bore into his, wide and questioning. The only part of Snape’s face that spoke of his sorrow were the lines of his lips, the rest was carefully blank. He couldn’t speak, only hang his head in confirmation. Her face seemed almost to spasm. she grabbed the collar of her jumper, next the back of the sofa, her hair and finally his shoulder in quick succession before snatching her hand away. Suppressed hysterics.  
“What? What was taken from me?” Her voice was different now-low, thick, and full of threatening tears. But Snape, indecisive about how best to calm her, was on his feet again, pressing her shoulders back into the sofa, making shushing noises, brushing her hair back from her forehead. With a black surge of irritation she swatted his anxious hands away. “Tell me,” she said through gritted teeth.  
“You have to be calm first, Lily. You can’t scream.”  
“I wasn’t going to scream,” she replied fiercely.  
“You are still, at this moment, in immense danger. You must control yourself no matter how hard this will be to hear,” he used clipped, commanding tones, ones he had never used with her before. It was a way of speaking he had just recently learned in his classroom at Hogwarts and in the presence of less-favored Death Eaters. He had found that they usually helped him get his way.  
She recoiled at his words and surveyed him with suspicion. Finally, her shoulders sagged, and she turned expectantly towards him, gripping her thighs as if they were anchors.  
Snape regarded her from behind the small parting in the curtain of his black locks. “It seems you’ve lost the past five years of your life. We are twenty-one years old, not sixteen.”  
“Who did this?” She hissed, moving forward.  
Annoyed, he held up a silencing hand. “I asked you to be calm. Please do not interrupt. We will get to that.”  
“I don’t know what’s gotten into you recently, Sev, but I don’t like the way you’re speaking to me right now. You’re not bloody in charge of me. I’ve known you since you were nine years old; I’ve seen you in your pants!”  
Snape stared at her, eyes wide in surprise. He had forgotten what the real Lily was like and not the dimmer, more placid reconstructions of her in his mind of the past four years. She was right of course, and he felt his new favorite facade melt in the face of her ferocity and familiarity. Everything in his face seemed to sag, “I’m sorry, but do you remember Voldemort?”  
She nodded warily. “He did this to you. He’s gained an immense amount of power since then. There’s a full on war now, Lily. You were fighting in it.”  
“He found me and obliviated me instead of killing me? That doesn’t make sense.” There it was, the swiftness of her intelligence.  
He couldn’t tell her about his hand in the whole prophecy matter now, not when she had to cooperate for at least the next couple of weeks. So he told her as close to the truth as he could get. “The Dark Lord learned of a prophecy that foretold his own destruction. His plan to avoid this destruction involved murdering you. I found out about this plan and asked him to spare you, to find another way, never believing that he actually would. I went to Dumbledore with this knowledge and asked him to help me protect you. Those protections, to my horror, failed tonight. I was called to a meeting with him tonight and he had you. He had modified your memory to make you forget that I was Death Eater. He then gave me you to protect as a way to gain my loyalty and endebt myself to him. He felt if you didn’t know I was Death Eater that would make it easier for me to keep you close.” He met her eyes then, willing her to believe this, to accept it and stay and not cause trouble. He would have to tell her the truth soon, but that could come right before she was spirited away by the Order for safe keeping.  
She looked pensive for a few silent moments, trying to find any fault in the story. Going over each point’s likelihood as if she could smell the reek of lies coming off it. She groaned in frustration and flung herself back down upon the coach, fists over her eyes. “I have so many questions. The first of which is why are you a Death Eater?” It was not confrontational or angry like he had expected it to be. She spoke faintly, to the ceiling, not even turning her head to look at him.  
He would have to be the one then to make the first chip in his facade of innocence. He had already lied enough that night. “I joined the Death Eaters out of Hogwarts. I did it because I wanted to be powerful and there is unplumbable power in the Dark Arts. Voldemort can lead me farther along that road than anyone. I was welcomed and respected amongst the Death Eaters as I had not been at Hogwarts. Lily, believe me, I have regretted from the moment I learned you were in harm’s way. I-” he paused to take a steadying breath. It was harder than he had anticipated, intentionally sabotaging any sliver of hope he had ever had of regaining her respect, and this was only the tip of the iceberg. “I totally disavowed Voldemort and the Dark Arts recently.”  
Despite the familiar look on her face of thinly veiled disgust, he felt a burden lift from him. It was the relief of finally laying that old festering wrong within him bare before the only person to whose judgement he was willing to submit. She was still looking at him, sitting up again, her eyes sad, appraising, lips pursed. The rebuke he expected never came. “You work for Dumbledore now?” she asked quietly.  
“Yes.”  
“Then my second question is what’s the actual reason Voldemort spared me and obliviated my memory?”  
She hadn’t bought it after all. His reply was insistent “I told you. I made it clear that I had an attachment to you and he found a way to accomplish his goals while exploiting that weakness I showed him. Dumbledore thinks he will come after you again for a second time.” He felt the need to cushion as much as possible the blow of the loss of Harry and James and yet at the same time felt no concern telling her that the most powerful wizard of all time would probably seek to murder before the month was out. She didn’t even blink at this pronouncement either. He felt a sudden surge of affection for the brazen gryffindor before him. He realized it was an odd reason to love someone when brazen gryffindors were usually his least favorite people.  
“I heard you the first time, but surely he thinks he has your loyalty already or you wouldn’t still be here? Why would you, of all the Death Eaters would be given such a great gift as the sparing of a friend?”  
He had been avoiding this mainly for the sake of tact, but if she did not give a damn about that, then neither did he. “The Dark Lord is under the impression that I harbor a certain carnal appetite for, well, you. He finds the idea of effectively imprisoning a muggle born witch with a Death Eater who would force himself on her repeatedly highly amusing,” he didn’t hide the disgust in his voice at the idea.  
“What makes him think you’d do that, Sev? He reads minds does he not?” she asked quietly.  
He leaned forward then, burning with the injustice of her implication. “He can’t see into mine or we’d both be dead right now” he spat in a low menacing voice, anger contorting the face that previously held only exhaustion and sorrow.  
“I didn’t mean-” she began, but he had already swept from the room. She thought he was gone for good and that she would have to spend the night on that sofa, but he came back a few minutes later holding a glass of water in one hand and wine in the other. Silently he thrust both towards her.  
“Water and wine. You could have just mixed them together, like the Ancient Greeks, remember?” she said with a small, conciliatory smile back up at him. It was a call back to an old inside joke between two nerdy fourteen year olds. He didn’t smile but visibly relaxed and went to the armchair to watch her drain both. She swung her legs around so her feet were on the floor. They faced each other.  
“Where were we? You have more questions I believe?”  
“Yes, well, I see your point now about him sparing my life,” this time she did seem a little embarrassed, ducking her head for a second. He nodded tersely. “So you joined Voldemort in seventh year?”  
“The Dark Lord wanted to be thorough, I presume. He, of course, does not know the details of our...” here he paused. He was was speaking slowly, carefully, knowing the importance of her believing him at least for the time being. “...Friendship.” It had been years since the two of them could have still been considered friends. Of course, most of those memories were far fresher in her mind now than his. However, she had used the term earlier so he felt she would not object to it now. “He does not know that you had concerns about my... allegiances years before I joined him. I joined his ranks a few months after leaving Hogwarts.”  
“And what have I been doing for the past five years?” They were speaking quite calmly now, though her voice shook slightly with emotion at that last question. He was in fact surprised by how composed she’d been so far. He would have thought it was the aftereffects of the memory charm dulling her senses, but she had already proved her mind was alert as ever. It must be her silly bravery then or a determination to obey his warnings despite her earlier outburst against them.  
“You have been working with the Order of the Phoenix under the command of Albus Dumbledore, to fight against the Dark Lord. Besides that, I know very little. As you can imagine, we do not see each other anymore.”  
She looked him in the eyes then as if trying to divine something from their dark depths. “Where are they then? The Order of the Phoenix, my friends, Dumbledore? Why did they just leave me here with you?”  
He tried his best to ignore the subtle sting of those words and reply calmly, “As the most important double agent Dumbledore has, the preservation of my cover, so to say, is imperative. The Dark Lord would know almost immediately if you were given back to his enemies. I am sorry. It is for my sake that you must stay here.”  
“Look, I don’t want to put you in any danger, Sev, but I’m not sure about this. I don’t have to stay here or do anything Dumbledore or you say! I need to focus on what’s important now which is getting my memories back.” He tone of her voice edged a little higher. It was the distrust he had suspected she was hiding throughout their little interview finally coming through.  
“Don’t be selfish. You want Voldemort defeated do you not? Then this is how it must be.” He hadn’t intended that to come out so harsh, but she wasn’t taken aback, her eyes just blazed a little brighter.  
“Of course, I want him defeated. Frankly, how dare you accuse me of being selfish when you’re the fucking Death Eater!” She was glaring at him now.  
It was true. Why was Lily always so horribly, damnably right? She was right about everything, and especially him. The only thing she’d ever been wrong about was Potter, and she’d even saw through him in the beginning. His head drooped into his hands.  
“Sev,” Lily whispered, “I don’t want to be say anything that would hurt you, but I have no idea what’s going on or where any of my friends or my family are! I’m so-”  
“I know this is hard for you, Lily! I’m trying to help you, trying to save you, but Dumbledore’s in the way, and the Dark Lord’s not going anywhere,” he couldn’t keep the emotion out of his voice. “Surely, you believe that I’m in this for you and not myself? I risked everything asking the Dark Lord to spare you!” He beseeched her.  
“Yes, but you became a Death Eater, you called me a mudblood, you and your friends did all those horrible things. And now, I have to live with you? Have to trust you? I wish more than even you do that all those things weren’t true. That you were still just Severus with the baggy clothes who showed me what magic was. I knew that Severus; he was my friend. But I don’t know if you’re my friend anymore.”  
The truth dawned on him then. “But that Severus was miserable and weak and pathetic,” Snape seethed venomously.  
“And you seriously don’t think you’re still pathetic and miserable?” She gestured around the room, “Because it looks like it’s even worse now.”  
He supposed he could now add being called pathetic by the woman he loved to the list of his nightmares had that come true. He spoke, low and deadly, “Go then. Leave. Call your Order friends and get out. I’ll have to find a way to explain it away or I’ll die, it doesn’t seem to matter what happens either way to you.”  
“Sev! That is not what I meant. If you think I’d leave anyone, especially someone who was my oldest friend, alone to be killed by Voldemort, then you don’t know me at all.” She was standing over him now, chin out, eyes wide and boring into him. He was glad she had recovered enough to stand at least. She drew herself up proudly. “Now. I’m staying. But I need to talk to Dumbledore or to Mary or Marlene.”  
“He’s at Hogwarts right now, it’s term. He can’t just come running at your beck and call.” The storm had passed, but there was still a chill between them.  
“Ok, then. Do you think it would be safe to floo Mary? Could someone come here without being detected by Voldemort?”  
“Mary Macdonald is not active in the Order of the Phoenix. Her whereabouts are unknown; it is believed she has fled the country.” He silently willed her not to ask about Marlene.  
“Alright, who can I contact then?”  
If she talked to anyone, she would find out about Harry and James. He couldn’t even think of any of her friends who were still alive or not in hiding. “Must you talk to someone else?” he asked brusquely.  
“Yes.” It would have to be Dumbledore then.  
“I can try to contact Dumbledore, but he probably won’t come or respond. He just left here. It’s Halloween night.”  
Lily glanced towards the windows now, noting the darkness behind the drawn curtains and put a hand on her opposite shoulder, as if just now noticing the cold. “He left without talking to me?”  
“Yes, the only wizard the Dark Lord fears does have a tendency for leaving messes for other people to clean up.” Snape said dryly. “He assumed, of course, you would trust my own explanation.” There was a hint of accusation in his tone. He approached the fireplace and picked up the cup of floo powder. He went to his knees, Lily standing anxiously behind him. He’d always hated the indignity of the stooping and the soot involved in the whole process, but the only person he felt comfortable contacting by Patronus these days was Dumbledore.  
A few moments later, he found himself looking out of the fireplace into Dumbledore’s office. He called for Dumbledore. The gray-haired wizard appeared looking puzzled.  
“Is everything alright, Severus?”  
“Lily wishes to speak to you, headmaster,” he said with an irrepressible eye-roll and then quickly drew his head out, motioning for Lily to take his place. Snape was decidedly not in the mood to recount the story of Lily’s mistrust and anger towards himself. He couldn’t hear what the two of them were talking about as he lounged against his mantel piece waiting for them to finish. It didn’t take long however before Lily’s head reappeared. The blazing, angry look in her eyes told him Dumbledore had done nothing but confirm his own story. She sat back down on the sofa in a huff. He offered her another glass of wine. She took it and with brows drawn low and together took large gulps of it. His lips twitched upwards.  
“So my parents? Tuney?” It appeared the interview was being resumed.  
“Your parents are abroad indefinitely for their safety. Petunia is with her muggle husband living in the muggle world, I believe.”  
“I want to go see her.”  
“That would not be wise.”  
“Surely I can come and go a few times.”  
“I don’t think you would be welcome there.” He also didn’t think that it was worth it, but knew from experience Lily was not receptive to this line of reasoning.  
“Oh come on, you’ve always hated her. You just don’t understand, we are sisters.”  
“I’m not your jailor. Do what you wish,” he dared her, knowing he could not actually let her go until he had told her about her parents.  
“You said Mary’s in hiding what about the rest of my friends-Marlene, Emmeline, Alice, and Dorcas?”  
“As you’ve so eloquently pointed out, I am a former Death Eater. For their own safety, I know little about the whereabouts of those in the Order of the Phoenix.”  
“So they’re in the Order? Are they all...safe?” She was gazing at him, on the alert it seemed for any minute facial expression that would betray a lie.  
Midnight of the night on which she was obliviated and her husband and child murdered seemed like a bad time to tell her two of her best friends had also been murdered. However, he didn’t see a way out of this situation without even more blatant lies. Lily Potter’s world was broken beyond repair and there was nothing to do but slowly, painfully reveal to her the magnitude of that damage, the magnitude of her loss. He had to start that process somewhere.  
“Marlene and Dorcas are dead, both by the Dark Lord’s bidding. Alice and Emmeline fight on.”  
She didn’t react for a few moments. He wondered anxiously if she had heard him or if she was about to have a psychotic break. He’d never really comforted anybody before; he didn’t know how. “Would you like to be alone or lie down? I have a room for you. Or perhaps more wine? I also have firewhiskey if that would help.” Her eyes were glittering now, tears beginning their journey down her pale cheeks. Her face was crumpled in a way he’d never seen before. He felt intrusive, seeing her open grief. He understood a little better what the Order was fighting for, to keep moments like this from happening again.  
“Where’s the room?” She asked.  
He flicked his wand and the hidden door in the bookcases swung open, revealing the stairs behind it. Without a word she hurried up them. When he heard her racking sobs, he closed the bookcase door again. He listened to the wheezing sobs now significantly quieter than before and felt the horror of what he would have to do to her soon enough seep through him. The horror existed only because of the Dark Lord. His new-found hatred for his former master surged in his blood. It had only been a few weeks, yet he felt in that moment that the disillusionment was complete.


	3. Two-Changes

Lily’s eyes were puffy and red the next morning when she finally appeared in the kitchen where he was waiting. He was carefully dressed in the full set of black robes he taught in. She was still wearing the jumper and jeans from last night. He had already missed one of his classes waiting for her, but he had wanted to see her and explain before leaving. She stopped in the doorway of the small, dingy grey and brown kitchen and seemed taken aback by his appearance. 

“I have to go to Hogwarts.”

“To talk to Dumbledore?” she asked, her voice still raw from last night.

“No, I am a professor there.”

Lily’s eyebrows raised and she blinked. “Merlin, Sev, that’s brilliant; you were always near the top in classes. I am thrilled for you, I really am, but aren’t you a little young?”

He hadn’t expected that to be her objection. He looked down at the surface of the wooden table. “Dumbledore has no concerns about my position as potions master. If you’ll excuse me, I am already missing a class.” He stood and did his best attempt at sweeping out of the painfully ordinary kitchen. Lily trailed him, brow contracted and arms crossed. It only took him a couple of long strides before he was across the drawing room and at the door. He turned to her then as if the thought had just struck him.

“You’ll need to stay here while I’m away. I should be back tonight.” He said shortly.  
He wrenched open the door and looked back at her, standing there in the middle of his house, hair tangled and loose, some freshly blossoming bruises on her chin he hadn’t noticed last night, and wearing rumpled clothes. He met her eyes, feeling that perhaps now he could face both the congratulations and reproach that were in her eyes. In a softer voice he asked, “You will stay for now won’t you?”

She nodded, a soft smile on her lips. “Of course, for now,” she said and then in a more steely voice, “Anything to defeat him.”

He nodded and left. On the pavement outside, he muttered a few more protective spells before turning into nothingness and finding himself outside the Hogwarts gates. 

 

In the entrance hall, he turned not towards the corridor that lead to the dungeons, but towards the first floor staircase which would lead him eventually to Dumbledore’s office. His first class would have been almost halfway over by now, but he considered missing double potions with the Gryffindor and Hufflepuff third years a silver lining in the misery of the past day. In the morning light, he had awoken with a new found clarity about the situation, a clarity which illuminated who was the deserving of his anger. 

“Drooble’s Blowing Gum” he muttered to the Gargoyle guarding Dumbledore’s office. The old wizard was behind his desk which was crowded with mountains of parchment. 

“Ah, Severus, I must confess I thought we had seen rather enough of each for a little while.”

“You promised you would protect them,” said Snape,determinedly avoiding Dumbledore’s gaze as if it would help still the shaking in his voice.

“I thought they were protected by the fidelius charm I performed for them, but it seems Lily and James Potter put their trust in the wrong person.”

“Who?” asked Snape, his face was white yet eyes eager.

“Sirius Black.”

Snape’s face contorted for a moment before he asked so quietly that it was barely audible, “Where is he?”

Dumbledore was, as ever, surveying him calmly. “On his way to Azkaban this very moment.”

He felt hollow instead of satisfied. The damage Black had inflicted was permanent.  
“But Severus, this is really quite touching. I assumed at first, and to my shame now, that you wanted Lily Evans for yourself, yet here I see you as angry about the death of James as anyone could be. It is a wonderful thing to be surprised by the transformational power of love.”

Suddenly, his wand was out and pointed at Dumbledore’s face. “This has nothing to do with James potter,” he spat, over-articulating every word. Dumbledore simply smiled at him and after a few moments, he gradually lowered his wand, flushing slightly at his own outburst.

“I did not think it had anything to do with James Potter, but to tell you the truth, Severus, your response has been far more compassionate than I could have hoped. I think you underestimate the transformation it has already wrought in yourself.”

He said nothing, but sourly inspected the portraits on the wall. It was true though, however he might try to avoid it. Part of the aching sorrow he felt was for James and the boy. Not because he felt anything close to love for them, but because Lily had loved them with that level of ferocity with which she loved everyone in her life. But that had always been part of the gulf between them, hadn’t it? Lily was love itself, yet he had grown up nursed on hate. The seeds had been there at the beginning of their friendship, when they were young, but like weeds, with time and nourishment, that fundamental difference grew up with them to choke the life out of their relationship. 

Finally, he came to sit in the chair opposite Dumbledore, still not making eye contact, letting his hair cover most of his face from view. 

“Are there plans for her eventual extraction?” Snape asked, changing the subject.

“Unfortunately, the Order has more important matters to attend to.”

“If you’re trying to save the ministry, I’m sorry to inform you, but it’s downfall is an inevitability at this point.” Snape sounded wary, as if he had said this a hundred times.

“I appreciate your information, Severus, and the danger you face in order to bring it to me, but I must insist that you respect the conclusions I myself make from it,” replied Dumbledore cheerily. 

“I respect them, Dumbledore, but if you want me to continue risking my life to help you and your Order, you would make Lily Potter’s safety your priority.” Snape rose from his seat. It wasn’t entirely true though, hadn’t he realized that just last night? Dumbledore was looking at him searchingly as if he could discern Snape’s thoughts. 

“I know your views on what the Order’s priorities should be, Severus, but once again I must beg to differ. I’m afraid going into hiding and giving up the wizarding world to Voldemort, is not an option the members of the Order are ready to consider yet.”

“Then you’re all fools.” 

Dumbledore’s eyes fixed on a point on the wall behind Snape, as if remembering something. “Perhaps not. There is more to Tom Riddle than you, or any Death Eater knows.” He looked up at Snape then, “And how is Lily? She was not very happy with me last night, as you can imagine.”

Snape’s lip curled, “All sunshine and roses.”

Dumbledore looked down at his hands on his desk, for the first time his chipper demeanor was gone. “I am dreadfully sorry for what’s happened to her. My failure of her is something I might have to live with perhaps for the rest of my life.”

Snape did not reply, not trusting his own voice when he felt so powerfully how he himself had failed Lily. He shouldn’t have trusted Dumbledore, everyone was fallible. He could have taken matters into his own hands. However, he simply nodded in response. 

The clock struck and Dumbledore turned towards it. Recovering himself, he said, “Now, I do believe there are some impressionable first years in the dungeons waiting for their potions lesson to start. You’d better hurry.”

 

He ate dinner as early as possible in the Great Hall before slipping out and down into the grounds towards the gate. It was already totally dark when he reached the gates and felt a sense of dread pulling him back to Hogwarts and the simplicity of being just a professor and nothing else. Lily was a problem, a time bomb of sorrow and death just waiting to explode and he was the one who had to set it off. How he had once fantasized about a situation such as this-Lily at home, waiting for him, Harry and James conveniently out of the way! Yet here he was, loathe to return to face her. Once past the gates, he disapparated.

He opened the door and saw her like she had been the night before, lying limply on the couch. Her unwashed face was crisscrossed with layers of tear tracks, her eyes even more red and puffy than the morning, a dead look in her eye. It had been a mistake, an obvious mistake in hindsight, to leave her isolated for an entire day with nothing to do but stew upon the death of her friends and the loss of her memories. He had been so caught in his anger at Dumbledore, the Order, even at her that he had forgotten that she might need to be looked after. But that was understandable, Lily Evans had never needed to be looked after before. 

She didn’t look to see him come in, but instead asked in a hard voice, “Where’s my wand?”

He froze, in the hubbub and hysteria that was another thing he hadn’t thought about. “I suppose the Dark Lord must have taken it from you and destroyed it. It would be easier that way for me to control you,” he replied silkily, resisting the urge to rise to the note of accusation in her voice. 

“I can’t live like this,” she turned her head towards him then. He hovered by the door, uncertain how to proceed. “I need my friends and my family. I thought at least I’d have some company, but it turns out you get to run off to Hogwarts everyday and pretend like the world isn’t ending.”

He barely control his anger this time, “I know more than anyone that the world as we know it is ending,” he hissed at her. 

“What? Because you’re a spy? You still have your freedom and your powers and respect,” she was sitting up again now. Would he really have to endure a do-over of last night?

“But I never had a family or friends like you did. At least you’ve known happiness.” He hadn’t meant to be quite that honest, but his bitterness was always something he’d been bad at containing.

Lily’s face didn’t soften though, “Oh yes, poor Severus, with his friends who bully others and his favor in both Voldemort and Dumbledore’s circle. You always were a power hungry twat, Sev, at least it sorta worked out for you. The most valuable spy, so valuable that you get to imprison a member of the Order of the Phoenix in your house and no one gives a toss!”

“Leave then!” It was a yell that he stopped halfway through. They were both standing now, facing each other across the room. He rubbed his forehead with his hand before saying in tones he tried to imbibe with superciliousness, “This is an argument about nothing. I’ve had enough.” He pointed his wand at her and transfigured her clothing from the night before into what his memory of her nightgown was like and strode into the kitchen. After a few moments she joined him at the kitchen table, determinedly avoiding his eyes. Nevertheless, there was a new softness in her posture. Snape felt the sudden impulse to ask her how her day had been but he’d never asked anyone how their day had been, and he didn’t know how so they just sat for a few moments in silence. 

Instead he asked, “Have anymore questions?”

“Well, my wand was the main one I had, I suppose.”

“I don’t know how to get you another,” he confessed. “Ollivander’s in hiding.”

She turned her head to give him a look almost as piercing as Dumbledore’s, as if she was on the cusp of asking how he knew that, but apparently, like him, was not in the mood for a repeat of the night before. 

“So I’m supposed to just stay here, for a month or so, doing nothing all day with no one around and then move to the other location eventually and do the same?” Lily asked.

“Perhaps you’d be with other members of the Order and not a Death Eater,” he replied absently, thinking instead of the likelihood that he would have to be the one to find a way to hide Lily permanently. 

“I don’t completely loathe being here, Sev, from the sounds of it you’re one of my only friends left, but I have to have some sort of life.” She was quiet for a moment more before asking, “Do you happen to know by chance how Dumbledore tried to protect me?”

He paused for a moment, realizing an honest answer to this question was impossible as well. “Not the specific spells, no.”

“Oh, well, it just seemed odd-that Dumbledore would promise to protect me and fail at it. If anyone could thwart Voldemort, it would have been him.”

Snape said nothing, just stared at the table, memories of Sirius coming to him, unbidden. Lily had looked at him expectantly, but realizing he wasn’t going to answer stared down at the wooden surface smoothed through years of use instead. There was an aura of defeat in the slump of her shoulders. It was unnerving to see it, he couldn’t remember her ever looking so sad before. “Food?” he asked. People used food to comfort others didn’t they?

Lily looked up eagerly. “Yes, please, Merlin’s pants, I’m starving. That’s what got me thinking about my wand in the first place. You don’t really have anything very edible around here.”

“I live at Hogwarts.”

“Yes, obviously, I realized that. Do you think you could transfigure those expired saltines into a sandwich?” She asked, noting his moment of hesitation before his open and nearly empty kitchen cupboard. A few moments later, she was excitedly digging into a rather plain ham sandwich. The moment suddenly felt strangely too intimate, watching her eat, sitting together in his own dingy kitchen talking comfortably like the past five years had never happened. Of course, for her, they hadn’t, he reminded himself. He left the kitchen for his chair in the drawing room, suddenly unsure all over again how to be around her, how they should exist together in a domestic setting. He tried to pick up a book and read it, but found that when she finally reappeared in the doorway of the kitchen that he had only read two sentences of it. Angrily, he tried to continue to read. A small hiccup made him look to see her standing in the middle of the room, fresh tears skating down her cheeks. 

“C-could we go to their graves?” She asked in a loud whisper.

“Not a possibility.”

Her lip curled a bit but she said nothing. She looked towards the window, “What about Petunia? You said I could.”

“No.” Why couldn’t she just accept she needed to lie low for a few weeks?

“I’ll go on my own then.”

“You don’t even know where she lives,” he didn’t succeed in restraining his sneer.

“I’ll find out. There are muggle directories you know. I’ll get myself one of those. You can’t keep me here; you’re gone all day.”

“I actually can keep you here as you don’t have a wand. I’ve also been thinking of asking Dumbledore for a short sabbatical while I sort this whole abominable situation out.” 

She drew back from him as if stung, but he saw something even a little more disturbing in her eye, fear. She glared at him for a few moments before turning as if to huff off to bed, but with a flick of his wand the bookcase door swung shut, blocking her escape route. 

“What are you playing at, Sev?” she asked, rounding on him angrily. He regretted doing it, but this time she would actually listen and accept his apology. 

“We will go visit Petunia, you just have to give me some time,” he said by way of an apology. Lily seemed to realize it as such and gave a stiff nod. She sat back down on the couch across from him. She got up again, went to the kitchen, and brought back glasses of wine. He accepted his without thanks and sipped it silently. He watched her as she seemed to study the titles of the different books. 

“Do you know where I used to live?” She eventually asked. 

“Not really. Godric’s Hollow perhaps.” He hoped that would satisfy her and she wouldn’t start demanding expeditions there as well. 

“D-do you-you probably don’t know-but, did I have a...boyfriend perhaps? Or a fiance maybe?”  
Suddenly, his black eyes were riveted to her face. “Do you remember having one?”  
“No, not really,” she was clearly confused, and struggling to put it all into the words, “I just-it feels like I do...oh, nevermind it’s hard to explain,” she was pink. Embarrassed for some reason then. 

The question of what she was referring to was driven from his mind by a sudden, pain lancing through his forearm. In horror, he looked down to the tip of his dark mark, black as ink. How could he be called again when it had barely been a day?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My tumblr is wildlyandrogynoustiger.tumblr.com is you wanna follow me or ask me something. Also, I'm in school now and I have a huge writing project for that so updates might be kinda slow (like every two weeks) and short till May when I graduated (if I have finished this by then!) I am planning this to be novel length, but everything's still just rough ideas so who knows. Thanks for reading, I always appreciate your feedback!


	4. Three-Battle

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so so much for every single comment and kudos. I appreciate every single one. They really motivate me and keep me writing. I would respond to every single one, but I'd feel stupid just replying "thnx" six times. Also I just like two minutes ago realized I didn't have my ask box on tumblr open I'm such an idiot, but it's open now so come talk if you wanna.

The cold, wet wind blasting him as he landed on the hillside overlooking a spired castle, obscured in darkness. For one sickening moment he thought he was at Hogwarts, but realized the forest around the castle was too overgrown and reached all the way up to the doors. He walked forward cautiously, he had been expecting the Lestrange Estate when his dark mark burned, summoning him here. Could this be a trap? A figure appeared beside him, only dark robes and a sinister mask visible. He recognized the slope of the burly soldiers. Goyle. Feeling a little more assured, they silently walked through the overgrown path up to the castle and in through the wooden doors falling off their hinges. Inside, a scene not unlike that of the previous night was laid out before him. However, this time almost all the Death Eaters were masked and swathed in black robes. They milled nervously about the stone flagged entrance hall, whispering to each other. Snape disliked the sinking feeling in his stomach that he was missing something. He joined the knot of Death Eaters by the fireplace, made up of Rosier and the Malfoys. 

“Where’s your mask, Severus?” asked Narcissa, blonde hair streaming out from beneath her hood.

With a twitch of his wand, one identical to hers appeared in his empty hand. “And who’s babysitting Draco right now? Dear Aunt Bellatrix perhaps?” Snape drawled in reply, looking around as if looking for her. 

“Oh how you wish that were true.” Bellatrix materialized out of the darkness from somewhere behind Narcissa. She gave Snape her customary leer. “You know, Severus, I’ve started to wonder about you. Getting all cosy with Dumbledore and what exactly is it about that filthy mudblood you like so much?” Her heavily hooded eyes roved him hungrily. 

Snape returned her look steadily, “You know as well as I, Bella, that I was commanded to that teaching post by the Dark Lord himself. As far as the mudblood goes, I think the Dark Lord made it clear enough yesterday what my interest in her is,” he replied icily. Bellatrix had changed from the time when he knew her at school. He’d started to dislike her and now she had confirmed the growing distrust was mutual. He suspected it had a bit more to do with the favor Voldemort had started showing him over Bellatrix than with her seriously suspecting his true loyalties. 

Bellatrix’s mouth had curled up into one of her demonic grins. “And how is the dear mudblood, Lily isn’t? Had your fun with her yet?” Snape resisted the urge to slap Lily’s name out of her foul mouth. There was an off-putting eagerness in her voice. 

“Oh yes, it’s been quite fun, Bella. Unfortunately for you, the Dark Lord has made Lily Potter my play-thing and not yours.” He swore Narcissa’s mouth tighten a little at the implication he saw out of the corner of his eye. Bellatrix pouted but said nothing and then donned her mask, turning expectantly towards a dark corner in the room. Voldemort had entered from some dark recess on the other side of the hall from the doors. He glided across the floor till he was in the middle of the crowd. 

“My loyal Death Eaters, it is time. Tonight, the Ministry of Magic will fall. We are one step closer to the purification of Wizarding kind,” he proclaimed in his high, cold voice. Enthusiastic mutterings echoed across the hall. Snape froze, a horrible realization prickling his flesh. “We did not expect our opportunity to come so soon,” Voldemort continued, “But one of our friends at the ministry will be in striking distance of Minister Bagnold tonight and I saw no reason to wait. Go.” He raised his hands then almost as if to bless them. Several Death Eaters turned on the spot and disapparated, the others started to move out of the hall. Rosier tapped Snape as he had started forward. 

“We’re only auxiliaries. Those are scouts going now.” With a quick nod of understanding Snape hung back with his school friend, watching the Death Eaters around him coalesce into different groups and then disapparate or head out of the doors. This must have been what he had missed at the meeting last night. Had the Dark Lord excluded him from these plans on purpose or was that just a coincidence he wondered. He’d thought handing over the prophecy had bought him a lot more of Voldemort’s trust. Then again, did Voldemort completely trust anybody except for Bella and Nagini? Maybe he realized too late that the teaching job at Hogwarts put Snape in dangerous proximity to Dumbledore. Nevertheless, he ought to be more careful. No more Dumbledore showing up on his doorstep in case he was being watched. Finally, Rosier nodded to him and they both donned their masks. 

“The atrium of the Ministry of Magic,” he murmured to Snape. They turned into thin air and landed in the middle of a war zone. Jets of green, yellow, red, and blue light flashing around them. They ran for cover behind the mantle of a nearby fireplace. 

Snape peered out at the battle around him. A wall of Death Eaters was slowly advancing through the atrium, fiercely battling a jumbled group of wizards in a variety of clothing. With an unpleasant jolt, Snape recognized the Longbottom’s, Moody and other wizards in aurors’ robes. Rosier charged past him to join the fray. Certain only of the fact that he must keep appearances up, he followed. He stupefied a few Death Eaters as he ran up behind them, but turned his attention to the aurors and what remnants of the Order of the Phoenix were before them. He started casting lazily aimed stupefy spells towards them. He got a strange look from Avery who was beside him so he moved down the advancing line, deflecting when he needed to and sending unforgivable curses flying towards the blank black wall and line of elevator doors behind the defenders. It only took a few minutes until enough bodies had slumped to the ground before the approaching Death Eaters that the rest of the aurors and Order turned and fled into elevators. Many Death Eaters did their best to give chase, but Snape hung back, spying Rosier peering at the bodies on the ground instead of with the others. Snape approached him.

“Do you who this is?” Rosier asked, turning a body over with one of his toes. “He’s still alive, but I’m not sure if he would be of use to the Dark Lord.”

Snape looked down at the face of a blonde, middle aged man with glasses and a broad, red face and found to his relief that he truly did not. 

“No,” he replied mildly. “If I were you, I wouldn’t trouble the Dark Lord with your run-of-the-mill auror.”

“You’re right,” agreed Rosier. In a flash of green light, the man was dead. Snape stood rooted to the spot, experiencing for the first time in a long time regret that a person he didn’t know was dead. He had not intended for that to happen. 

“SNAPE!” a ragged cry tore through the stillness of the atrium. They both whirled to see Remus Lupin, patched robes hanging off his skeletal frame pelting towards them. His face was a mask of rage, white and red blotches. He was almost shaking, pointing his wand towards the two of them. Rosier had turned as well and was regarding Lupin with an amused and disdained look on his face. 

“Ah, the scum werewolf Dumbledore lets play wizard.” But Lupin wasn’t paying any attention to Rosier. His wild eyes were fixed on Snape as he crept close. 

“YOU KILLED THEM!” he screamed. 

Snape, composed and mouth flicking down into a sneer, raised a single eyebrow. “Actually, you have your dear friend Sirius to thank for that, I believe.”

Lupin faltered, more color draining from his face than Snape had thought it possible. It was so incredibly moronic of him to come tonight. He doubted Rosier would let Lupin out of it alive. Lupin recovered himself, more red blotches appearing on his face. He come to stand a good twenty feet away from the two Death Eaters. He was gulping in ragged breaths. 

“You had something to do with it, I know you did. You hated him. You always hated him. And here you are, a Death Eater. We all knew it, you know. As much as you tried to hide it, it got out.” He spit savagely. Snape regarded him silently, it was useless to argue with an insane man, especially one who would be dead in a few minutes. Lupin carried on, a quieter hiss this time. “Where’s Lily, Snivellus? You were always a jealous little slime ball. Dumbledore won’t say what’s happened to her, but her body wasn’t in the house. She’s gone and I’d bet anything you had something to do with it.”

Rosier was smiling. Snape realized what was coming next.  
“The mudblood’s whereabouts are none of your business, werewolf, but you should be happy to know that she’s serving a higher purpose now, providing certain services to one of the Dark Lord’s most faithful servants,” Rosier said, amusement flashing from his eyes. 

“HER NAME WAS LILY POTTER,” roared Lupin, eyes mad, “AND SHE’D DIE BEFORE SHE SERVED ONE OF YOU FUCKS.”

Rosier, turned to Snape with an exasperated eye roll at this outburst. “Shall I do it, Severus, or would you like the-”

But before he could finish, a jet of green light flashed from Lupin’s wand tip. In a split second, Snape had dropped to the floor in time to dodge it, dragging Rosier with him. They didn’t have time to react to the second spell, however, which followed closely on the heels of the second. Rosier screamed in pain, and as Snape turned to disarm Lupin, he was hit with the second cruciatus curse. Searing, burning pain filled his body. He felt like he was being torn open from the inside out, the atrium and Lupin’s livid face dissolved. His only reality was the pain and claw and crawl as much as he might, it was not abating. He did not realize he was screaming until the pain suddenly stopped and he was left sobbing with relief on the cool, smooth atrium floor. He tried to compose himself and reach for his wand. Lupin was standing over them, eyes wide, but this time with shock and confusion. He seemed conflicted. As he saw Snape move toward his wand, he turned and ran back towards the fireplaces. He fired a few curses back over his shoulder. Snape had been moving over to check on Rosier at the sight of fleeing Lupin and didn’t see them in time. One heavily slammed into his body as if a giant had thrown a giant stone slab, and he slipped into darkness. 

 

He opened his eyes to the ceiling of his parent’s old bedroom, the bedroom he now used as his own when he wasn’t at Hogwarts. The ceiling had originally been white but was yellowed and gray now from smoke and and age. He blinked and looked around. The room was like the rest of the house after he had redecorated. The walls were lined with bookshelves haphazardly crammed with books. There was a large wooden desk under the only window in the room. There were a few small cauldrons, a variety of tools and ingredients, and a locked wood and metal case. He kept the potions he thought the Dark Lord most likely to request of him here, for easy access, but since a few weeks ago he had started brewing less dangerous fakes of those potions. Potions that would temporarily harm instead of permanently harm or entirely fake ones. It had been a request Dumbledore had made of him early on. 

He was in his bed, a lumpy mattress low to the ground since his parents had never bothered buying a proper bed frame. The sheets were the old white with flower patterned ones that had been passed down from his grandmother, thin with the use of many years. He was alone in the room, but the door leading through a hallway and then out onto the drawing room was open. After a few minutes, Lily appeared in the doorway. She leaned against the door frame and regarded him impassively. She held a hot cup of tea in her hand, but did not drink it. 

“Rosier brought you back here a couple of hours ago. He has your wand, I think he was afraid that I’d take it while you were unconscious and kill you.” 

“I’m sorry if he was...impertinent to you.” Snape tried to block the flashback to how Rosier relished the idea of horrible things he supposedly did to Lily. 

“I’m not afraid of Rosier, even without a wand,” she replied, chin jutted. He felt a warmth in his abdomen. She was Lily Evans still despite it all, coolly confident even in the face of things she really should fear. She looked at his desk. “Do you have any pepperup potion here or are all your stores at Hogwarts? I don’t know what hit you and even if I did, I couldn’t do anything, but I thought some of that might help.” 

“I have some in the chest. It is magically warded but with the key hidden in my copy of Moste Potente Potions on the right wall in the other room it will open. Towards the bottom.”

Lily left the tea on his bed stand and looked at him, eyes hard, but eyebrow arched. He couldn’t tell whether it was disgust at him owning a book filled with dark magic or whether she was impressed that he had such a well-thought-through back up. 

She came back in after a few minutes, holding a small, tarnished silver key that hummed with magic. “You know, inside your books is the first place someone would look.” she said, her voice light, but reproachful.  
He wondered if she would recognize the names on some of the vials in the chest and be even more disgusted. He had laid his head back down but was watching her out of the bottom of his eyes, trying to judge her reaction. He saw her rummage amongst the contents for some moments and then pause for a second, hand hovering. Her eyes slid back to him, but his eyes were barely open anyway so he could closed them quickly. He thought she slipped a clear vial into the sleeve of her jumper. She walked over to him, a strained, cheery smile on her face. She took the teacup, brandished the vial of pepperup potion at him and turned slightly, so that he could not see the teacup. She turned quickly back around and gently held it out to him. 

She was such a bad liar. He would have found it endearing if he hadn’t felt so betrayed. He hesitated but sipped it quietly. She watched him, an eagerness in her eyes. 

“Sev,” She began nervously after a few moments. He found it galling that she would still call him that after what she had just done. “What aren’t you telling me? What did I even do to make Voldemort so certain I was a threat to him?”

So it was Veritaserum she had tried to slip him. At least she wasn’t trying to hurt him, but this meant she did not trust him. He thought letting her talk to Dumbledore would have done away with questions about his character. But that wasn’t what she wanted to know. She wanted to know whether he was telling her the whole truth, and he wasn’t. She’d probably realized, as he did, that Dumbledore was not above convenient omissions of information as well.

He looked up at her, mouth wide, as if surprised. “Your parents are dead, I wanted to spare you that pain at least for a while.” He had been planning on giving her a couple days since she found out about Emmeline and Marlene, but she had chosen this herself. 

She stared down at him, face crumpled, eyes tearing up. Then turned abruptly and left the room. It had been some of his fake veritaserum otherwise the prophecy, James, and Harry’s deaths would of come spilling out of him as easily as pouring water out of a bowl. 

The pepperup potion had warmed him up a bit and he felt like he could move pretty easily. Instead he laid there, staring up at his discolored ceiling. He heard Lily’s distant sobs from up in her room. They were even worse than the first night, tearing, hoarse, and choking now. He tried to hold onto his anger, to make it kill the empathy for her welling up inside him. But, like a sand castle, dried and kicked over, it dissolved almost instantly. His whole life his anger was his weapon, the thing that had kept him safe and whole, but in the end, it had killed the thing he valued most. It wasn’t useful, not with now with what he wanted with Lily.

He got up and moved into the main room. The clock showed it was around 3 am; he would need to be at Hogwarts again in the morning. Though he supposed he wasn’t going anywhere unless Rosier gave him his wand back soon. As if summoned by Snape’s thoughts, Snape heard a crack outside his door. Rosier entered carefully, looking around before seeing Snape. 

“Oh good, you’re up. Those are some nasty wards you’ve put over this place, Snape.” He said, rubbing a spot on his arm. “I’m glad you she did not kill you while I was away. I remember what she was like at school.” He stopped, hearing Lily’s tears at that point. “You’ve outdone yourself my friend. Barely able to move and without a wand too! Most of us didn’t really think you had quite this much in you, I must say.” He exclaimed breathlessly, looking around with anxious energy. “Here it is then.” He handed the wand to Snape and he took it feeling relief. 

“You have my gratitude for tonight, Rosier.” He actually meant it. Not that he thought Lily would have used his wand to escape or hurt him, but the loss of his wand and being left in the atrium of the ministry would have been disastrous. 

“I’d best get back to father, now. You’ll be pleased to know the mission went perfectly. The ministry is ours and the minister is dead.”

“And who’s the new minister then?”

“Nott, reward for long years of service.”

“Ah.” Snape had stood and accompanied Rosier to the door. Rosier disappeared into the darkness outside and Snape wondered wearily back to his chair and lazily summoned a glass of wine with the flick of his wand. 

He didn’t want to sleep yet until Lily had fallen asleep and he could still hear her crying, though more soft and gasping now. He had a sudden vision of himself going up the stairs, softly entering the tiny bedroom, and putting a comforting hand on her shoulder. She’d look up at him, eyes wide and glassy, but grateful. He’d say something profound, something comforting, she’d move closer to him, seeking the comfort of his arms--He wrenched himself back to reality. He was no more welcome up there with her than he was in Lupin’s home right now. And the truth was there really were no profound, comforting words. Her pain was beyond words and it was useless to try.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I've actually planned out the whole plot and ending of this now and I'm really excited for it so I hope you guys stay along for the journey! Just wanted to reiterate that while I would love to spend all my time writing this, because of college and my research projects and trying to figure out life they probably are going to get few and farther between for a few months. If you have any questions head on over to my tumblr. I would love to talk more to you guys.


	5. Four-The Night

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THANK YOU as always for each and every one of your comments and kudos I read every single one, i think about every single one, I am thankful for every single one. I appreciate them SO so SO much.

Lily was not awake by the time he left for Hogwarts that morning. All in all, it was for the best, he thought, less of a chance for him to take his anger out on her. Having to spend so much time in his hideous, muggle childhood home full of stinking, fetid memories was wearing down the wall behind which he kept so much of his bitterness when Lily was around. He was also unreasonably angry at her for last night. Not because she had done anything terribly wrong if he was being honest with himself, but because her actions proved she didn’t trust him. Which meant that even when they were sixteen she hadn’t trusted him. He had always suspected as much, and she distrusted him at that point for good reason. He just couldn’t help the irrational anger he felt at it. 

His students and colleagues detected nothing out of the ordinary about his mood, he stalked around scowling, particularly at Dumbledore, during meals, and had a temper the length of an ant’s antenna. Professor Snape did however seem to have stopped giving detentions, instead using house points, extra homework, and significant grade deductions as punishments. One seemed to run into him less after hours or in the staff room. Presumably, he was shutting himself up in his office to work on some newly discovered, highly difficult potion. 

He arrived on the doorstep of his same old, grubby house that night, taking a few moments to mentally steele himself against whatever state Lily would be in, whether that was more hysterical crying, stony silence, hostile outbursts, or all three at the same time. He grasped the door handle and pushed it open. The main drawing room was empty, but he heard some sniffling from upstairs. Sitting down with a book, He took the opportunity to finally have some alone time for what felt like the first time in a couple days. 

As the evening wore on, he began to wonder if she would ever appear. Surely, having spent the entire day cooped up in the same house she would want to at least spend some time outside of her room? She did, however, descend the staircase and peer out from behind the bookcase at around 9 pm. Her eyes were red and puffy as they now usually were. He lowered the book to look at her. Without speaking, she walked deliberately into the kitchen and he heard the banging of pots and pans for a few moments. 

“There is absolutely no more food in this house; I’ve eaten it all and I’m starving.” Lily stood, hands on hips, silhouetted in the kitchen door frame. 

“I’ll summon some bread from the neighbors, they won’t notice it missing,” he dismissed her concern in a monotone. 

“You will absolutely do no such thing, Severus Snape. What you will do is give me some money so I can go buy myself some food. I don’t steal.” She tossed her long red hair behind her shoulder. 

Snape glared at her. He found himself, like always, split between admiration and annoyance. “That’s not exactly possible. I only have wizard money and it’s in a vault at Gringotts. Surely there’s something in there that can be transfigured into food.” 

“There’s only half a bottle of elf-made wine and a bottle of firewhiskey left in that entire kitchen.”

“You couldn’t have left a single cracker, even one cracker would suffice, to transfigure?”

“Oh I’m so sorry, Severus, that I don’t know Gamp’s First Law off the top of my head, silly me, I should have been revising while the most powerful dark wizard of all time was trying to kill me!”

Snape tossed his book aside and stood up. He opened his mouth to speak, but Lily cut across him, her eyes narrowed and arms crossed, “I know you’ve got to have some muggle money from your dad around here somewhere, Severus. I really don’t understand why you’re making this difficult. It’s not my fault there isn’t any food here. I’m sorry that I’m a human who requires food to live!”

He didn’t have a reply to that because she was right. She was staying at his house expressly for the purpose of being protected and part of that would obviously include feeding her. But instead of saying this, they both just stood for a few moments, tensed, angry, firsts balled, glaring at each other. It was Lily who broke it by looking down and crossing her arms again. He relaxed too and picked up the book from where it had been unceremoniously disregarded by him. He did have a muggle bank account with one or two hundred quid in it. That account and this house were the piss-poor inheritance he’d had from his beast of a father. The idea of touching Tobias’ money made his skin crawl. 

“We’ll have to go to the muggle bank first. I imagine it’s not even open.”

Lilly rolled her eyes at him, “Don’t pretend like you’re such a high and mighty pure-bred wizard that you don’t know what an ATM is, Sev. Do you have the card for the money?”

He didn’t say anything except bent to pick up his book and then disappear into his room. He rummaged around in his old text book from the few weeks he’d been in Divination in third year before he’d quit, deciding extra time with Lily wasn’t even worth having to listen to that rubbish. The card was tucked amidst the pages toward the back. He walked back out to the living room and handed it silently to Lily. 

“The code’s 1234.” His father was an imaginative man. 

She looked down at the card and then up again somewhat shocked. “Aren’t you coming with me?”

“I don’t see why not.” He flung himself back down into his chair. Grateful for the chance to escape her glowering and grieving for the evening. Besides, she didn’t need him to look after her, hadn’t she proven that the other night with her little veritaserum stunt and Rosier?

“Well, don’t you want to protect me she asked?” Shifting her weight around and sounding uncertain. “You were the one going on about how in danger I am and Voldemort trying to kill me again.”

“If the Dark Lord truly wanted you dead at this moment there’s nothing I could do to stop him,” he said in a silky yet clipped voice. Their eyes met. “The only danger you face is from Death Eaters and the Dark Lord, trust me none of them are haunting Cokeworth unless for good reason and they know that at the present moment you are under my protection.”

Lily’s upper lip had curled a little at the end of his reply but she just gave a frustrated sigh. “Oh don’t be such a damp rag, Sev. Come on will you. Besides how I am going to go anywhere without a wand at night? Like you said, this is Spinner’s End the high street is more than walking distance from here.”

He wasn’t really opposed to going with her. He was more opposed to the idea of letting Lily get her way. But he supposed if she was ever going to stop seeing him as a monster, he would have to be nice. He closed his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose and nodded. 

Lily smiled. “Thank you. Now, go get into your muggle clothes, you can’t be wearing robes like you’re dracula or something in a muggle pub.”

\-----------------------------------------------------

Sev trudged out of the narrow hallway leading to his room dressed in jeans that were far too large for him, held up by a battered brown leather belt cinched at the waist. Above that, he had on a long checkered shirt under an equally large and ill-fitting knit-jumper decorated with a hideous pattern clearly in style years ago. His skinny ankles poked out from beneath the jeans. He must be taller than his father ever was now, but obviously a good deal skinnier. The kindest thing would be not to react so, Lily just raised her eyebrows at him and asked, “Ready to go then?”  
His black eyes met hers for a moment and she read a curious distrust of her lurking in him. It wasn’t surprising, she reflected, after that nasty veritaserum trick from last night. She’d be surprised if he ever forgave her; Sev really hated being tricked by anyone. 

He lead the way moodily to the door, hunched slightly and not speaking. She followed him out onto the step and breathed in the crisp, cool night air with relish. For a moment she felt like the past 48 might never have happened. And she was just here, beside one of her best friends, in the beauty of an autumn night. She grabbed his arm, all skinny, angular bones beneath the giant shirt and jumper that swamped his frame. His head jerked towards her, confused for a moment.

“There’s this greasy old pub not far from my old house that serves food all night. We should go there, it’s not far from the high street where we can find the ATM.”

His face relaxed some and he cast down his eyes. “It might have closed since the last time you remember it.”

She didn’t need to be reminded of that stuff. In fact, that’s what she was trying so hard to forget about at the moment. “It’ll be there,” she said, giving him a brittle smile. He regarded her impassively for a few more minutes and then nodded. Without warning, they were disapparating, being squeezed and squeezed till she thought she could stand it no longer and then they were deposited with a soft pop along the high street of Cokeworth which had figured so prominently in her childhood. She knew it was years since she had been there, but to her it felt like she had been there only a few months ago on a clear August day with Marlene, sitting in Philomena’s Ice Cream Parlour, a dark shuttered shop several yards ahead of them, moaning about Potter and his lot. Marlene had teased her about Potter’s obvious crush on her and she had just changed the subject to O.W.L.s and N.E.W.T.s. She wondered vaguely what had happened to that lot, but thought it wasn’t the best subject to bring up with Severus.

“This way,” and she pulled him behind her, up the nearly deserted street to the ATM where her mum used to take her to withdraw money while they were running errands together. Sev looked down at her hand on his arm and then up again at her face, but she pushed on anyway. They got to the red, plastic, glowing ATM and Lily waited for a few moments, fidgeting in the cold while Sev withdrew money. 

She didn’t take his arm again as she led him back up the dark high street, most of the shops dark and closed and only a few other dark, coated figures drifting past them in the gloom. They crossed into a narrow alley between two buildings, only a few wide, and he trailed behind her as they stomped across the cobblestones. It took a sudden turn and soon they were inside the rickety, wooden building with peeling wallpaper interiors and a room hazy with cigarette smoke. 

Lily stepped up to the bar, ordering two beers and perusing their menus while Severus hovered awkwardly behind her, glancing around almost like a cornered mouse. He was a spy amongst the ranks of one the most evil people to ever live and yet the thing that frightened him was the local pub in his childhood home she mused. She decided on fish and chips and sat down at one of the poker tables with the velvet covering peeling up that the pubs used as tables. Severus joined her and looked at her warily before taking a sip of his beer and looking around the room. 

Lily dropped her forehead, smiling to herself and tasted her own beer. She pushed back the wave of thoughts about the last time she’d been there with her dead parents and friends and tried instead to focus on the man in front of her. She bloody well wasn’t going to have a terrible time like the last two nights. 

“So how is teaching at Hogwarts? I wouldn’t think you’d get along with the kids,” She asked. They were going to have a pleasant conversation for once she determined. His eyes swiveled back to hers and he leaned back. 

“Horrible, of course. But that’s the price I must pay for getting to live at Hogwarts instead of the hideous den the two of us are currently confined two.” Lily smiled despite herself. She couldn’t agree more about feeling confined to the hideous den that was his house. 

“Even the Slytherins? What about your N.E.W.T. students?” She raised an eyebrow, a smile playing on her lips. 

He looked at her quietly for a moment. “The best of the worst,” he replied simply and then was silent.

“How’s the staff room?”

“Unextraordinary.”

“And how does Mcgonagall feel about having you as a colleague?”

“Delighted,” He replied stretching the word out like a rubber band and then he smiled lazily at her. She pursed her lips and looked away, annoyed.

“What happened to Slughorn?”

But this time he didn’t answer.

“Did your dad ever come here?” she asked. She didn’t know what made her ask it, probably annoyance at his refusal to give her this one thing, this one night out from the suffocating feelings trapped in that old house. 

His face slowly drained of color. He took slow, deep breaths. She saw the anger twitching and twisting his lips. “Don’t you-how…” he calmed himself with another breath and looked away. He had calmed down when he looked back at her. “No, did yours?” he asked with a sneer.

She felt anger like a hot prick in the center of her chest. She could feel the tears that she had shed all day and had pushed down for a moment for this outing rising up. She couldn’t start sobbing there and then so she got up and stormed off to the toilets, promising herself she’d get him back somehow. 

Safely in a stall, she let loose the racking sobs that were every moment threatening to overtake her. She stuffed her hand into her mouth to muffle the small screams of pain she couldn’t contain when she let herself go like this. After a few minutes, the worst had abated. It would come again and many, many more times she knew, but for now, she could be composed. She sat there for an interminable amount of time, letting every emotion flow over her, not willing to fight and suppress them anymore. When she was finally feeling some semblance of happiness return, she dried the last of the stray tears, willing the redness in her eyes to go down some. 

The door to the women’s toilet creaked open and she was silent, waiting for the other person to do her business and then leave, but instead there was no movement towards the other stall. 

“Lily?” It was Sev. Without thinking, she had stood up and flung open the door. “Your food came and it’s getting cold.”

She just looked at him though, standing there lamely, hands in the pockets of the oversized jeans, occasionally glancing nervously at the door. 

“If I told you I was sorry would it make you feel better?” He asked after a painfully long stretch of time. He choked a little on the last word. Of course, she thought, he wasn’t capable of a genuine apology. In lieu of such, this was what she would have to settle for. She’d never heard him apologize to anyone but herself. 

She forced a smile at him. “No, I’m afraid there isn’t really anyway I could feel better.” She moved to washed her hands at the sink and he stood where he was. She should respond in kind. It was only fair and if they were actually going to live together, something was going to have to give and in this moment, she had calmed down enough that she felt she could be the thing that gave way. Afterall, He had realized he was wrong about all his creepy Death Eater friends hadn’t he? Dumbledore had assured her of his change of heart. 

“Look, Sev,” she turned towards him, hands still dripping with water, “I’m sorry about bringing up your dad it was a horrid thing to do. And I’m sorry-I’m sorry about last night. Dosing you. I understand if you can’t forgive me, but maybe you could see past it and we could be friends again just for a little while. Like the old days?” She reached for the paper towels, glad for an excuse not to look at him. 

When she turned back to look at him, his expression was guarded. She felt a pulse of frustration, he was so much more shut down, in control of his emotions, than she remembered him being. On the one hand, it helped their fights from getting too nasty, but on the other it just made her more keenly aware of all the things she’d done to make him distrustful of her. 

He studied the floor and then gave a small, yet sharp nod. She thought she saw a smile flicker at the corner of his lips before she pushed open the door and headed back into the dim inside of the pub. They sat down again and she tucked in to her fish and chips, trying not to notice how closely he was watching her. 

“Minerva’s actually been kinder to me than I expected. She treats me like a colleague.”

Lily looked up at him, surprised. He was leaning back in his chair, still watching her. Some tension that he had been carrying for the past few days seemed to have relaxed in him. She couldn’t help the mischievous grin that stretched across her lips, “Oh, it’s Minerva already is it? No longer Professor Mcgonagall?”

“She insists.”

“See, we Gryffindors aren’t all bad.”

He sipped his beer, eyebrows raised. “So far I’ve only counted two who are tolerable.”

“And what about me?” Lily teased.

He glared. “Fine, count yourself intolerable then, but your saving grace is you are not a nit wit.”

“And where does Dumbledore fit into Severus Snape’s definitive ranking of all the barely tolerable Gryffindors who have ever lived?”

“Nowhere. But his saving grace is the same as your own.”

Lily raised an eyebrow and then looked down at her food, silent for a few moments. “You know it’d be a lot funnier. This whole Gryffindor versus Slytherin tosh if they hadn’t all become Death Eaters and actually killed people.”

She looked up to see if she had set him off again, but he seemed to be lost in thought as well, staring into what was left of his beer. He passed a hand over his face and looked back at her, his mouth a solemn line, eyes tired. He agreed with her, she realized. 

“If you leave me some muggle money tomorrow I can go buy myself some more food and clothes,” She said, changing the subject.

He nodded, “You could throw all that money off a bridge and I wouldn’t stop you.” 

Lily ate the rest of her meal in silence. They tarried for a little while there after she was done, finishing off the beer and making small talk which mostly consisted of Lily asking the fate of certain people from school. Her surmises had pretty much been correct, all of Sev’s school friends where Death Eaters and most of her friends were in the Order of the Phoenix. 

“Sev,” she asked, hesitatingly, “About last night,” She felt his attention fasten onto her. “Rosier said...Well, he said that the ministry had fallen and that Nott’s minister now, a Death Eater.” She looked up at him hoping it wasn’t true, wondering how much he had to do with it. How far did he have to go to maintain Voldemort’s belief that he was loyal to him?

“Yes,” he spoke as if he was carefully laying the words down one-by-one like someone dealing cards in a game. “That is what Rosier told me as well. I was back up for the main attack on the ministry so I did not see much action.”

“Who tried to kill you, though?” She whispered, afraid of his reaction.

His dark eyes searched hers. “Didn’t Rosier tell you?”

“Lupin.”

“He’s concerned for your safety,” Sev replied curtly. The whole scene dawned on her, she looked down, embarrassed at what anyone who knew she was alive right now must think of her. Remus had been such a good friend the past year or so, or fifth year actually. Fifth year wasn’t last year anymore. 

“He got away unscathed. No thanks to his stupidity.” 

She sighed and drained the last of her beer, “It’s just a Gryffindor thing. You wouldn’t understand.”

His nostrils flared at that. “In my experience, the defining trait of a Gryffindor is foolhardy recklessness and stubbornness, not actual courage.”

She warily turned her head towards him, “It was bravery--Remus looking out for me like that,” she replied stonily. 

“It was foolishness.”

She wasn’t going to argue with him, not anymore that night. She didn’t want to end up sobbing in the bathrooms for a second time. That type of crying was best for the middle of the night, alone in her bed or when he was gone during the day. 

“Come one, let’s go,” She stood up and walked back out into the narrow alleyway. They turned the bend and found themselves alone again, out in the crisp autumn night. Sev wordlessly held his arm out to her for side-along apparition. She hesitated. 

The wind whipped her hair around her face and she had to pull it back off. “Could we just walk for a little bit? I don’t want to go back yet.” Sev frowned a little but followed her as she turned up the high street, facing into the breeze. She tilted her head back drinking in that night air, staring up at whatever stars she could make out in the black night sky. The fresh air soothed her, the only thing besides Sev that had successfully distracted her, at least for a few moments, from Emmeline and Marlene and Mum and Dad in the last few days. She had a feeling that she couldn’t explain as well, like she had been cooped up in Sev’s house longer than forty-eight hours. Maybe it wasn’t just his house, but some other house. 

She felt his presence coming up beside her, his jumper sleeve brushing hers, matching her leisurely pace. She wondered what he would do if she grabbed his hand now, not for any reason like side-along apparation or trying to get him to go somewhere, but just because she could, just because he was there and no one else was. Instead, she shoved her hands into her arm pits for warmth and stole a look at him. His head wasn’t turned towards the sky, but was turned towards her, watching her with that look she’d come to know in the past forty-eight hours, almost like he was watching for something in her face, some tiny flicker that would betray something--what it was she didn’t know. He quickly turned his head back to the street as she their eyes met, like he had been caught red-handed in a crime. She huffed and smiled a little to herself. They walked on into the night.   
\---------------------

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> PLZ if you read this and enjoyed it and would read more leave me a kudos or comment. It lets me know how I'm doing and it really keeps me motivated. Don't just lurk! also, fyi I'm an American and I'm trying to make this as accurate as possible but obviously I don't know everything about England or how English people would express certain things and I haven't found any good resources on 1970s British Slang so if there's any weird innacuracies I'm sorry. I studied abroad in England but there's still so much I don't know or understand. Also, I'm going to still try to keep this a mostly Snape POV fic, it's just Lily's POV felt right for their little outing.


	6. Five-Escape

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, it's been an entire month I'm am so so sorry about that! Life got crazy and I had to focus on academics first. Thank you so incredibly much to everyone's who has stuck with this. I'm so excited for all the stuff that's left to come. ALSO TW: REFERENCE TO RAPE, but I suppose there's been references to rape throughout this fic but just fair warning!

The days dragged on into monotonous weeks. Lily and Snape fell into an easy if unpleasant routine. He would leave early in the morning, before she was awake and come home late, after she had fixed herself dinner. Sometimes they would not even see each other, she, having retreated into the silence and solitude of her room before he even came home. But most days, she would be waiting for him, a book in her hand, on the couch or in the kitchen. They would have some small talk. “Was anything new at Hogwarts?” she would ask. She did not ask about how his meetings with Voldemort or other Death Eaters were going. 

He had taken out a subscription to the Daily Prophet for her so there was a little need for her to ask what was happening in the larger wizarding world. She could surmise for herself from the blatant anti-muggleborn language that the fight against the Dark Lord was not going well he presumed. 

After that, they would sometimes talk of their childhood. Despite himself, he would meet her smile, the lightness in her eyes as she thought of those memories, with a smile of his own here and there. Of course, he did not have the same amount of nostalgia for those times as she did. She, after all, had a happy childhood. The past was like the Elysian Fields to her. His own pleasant memories of those times involved only the two of them. Other days, they would both read in companionable silence in the drawing room. On rare occasions, they would go out somewhere. He knew it was reckless, that they could easily run into another Death Eater who thought she was being treated too well or one of her friends from the Order who would make a scene, but he could not help himself. Her eyes sparkled again when they went out, whether it was just to a grocery store that was open late or to a rundown pub, she smiled about twice as much when they were outside his house. He had been keeping count. These outings, as uncomfortable as they might make him on occasion, made him feel far less like her jailor and like something more akin to an actual friend. Or even what the strangers around them often assumed them to be, a couple. 

He stopped hating having her around so much. The happier she seemed with each outing, the less he felt the guilt of destroying her life weigh on him, the more he could picture a future without Voldemort, or dark magic, or even Hogwarts. Maybe they weren’t even together in these imaginings, even that was too fantastical a daydream for him, but they were at least friends. Good friends. 

However, in the few moments before he’d fall asleep at night, when he was being brutally honest with himself, he did not know how she was doing. He did not know what she did all day, whether she cried or moped or felt relaxed and safe and guarded. From the displacement of some of his books, he suspected she was whiling away her time systematically reading through all his books, but he could not be sure. He had not thought that you could live with someone for weeks and be this distant with them. She had stopped mentioning her family, her friends or her other life. Whether that meant they did not weigh on her anymore he did not know. He suspected, however, that, like how he had done with so many things, she had stopped mentioning them because there was no point on dwelling on the darkest parts of one’s life around others. What was really going on in their world: Voldemort, dead friends, the murders of muggleborns and muggles had become almost a taboo subject in his house. 

Lily was up in her room one night when he got back from Hogwarts. The kitchen was sterile and empty. She must have had dinner already, cleaned, and gone back up to her room. He knew from experience that this meant she probably would not appear again until tomorrow night. It was normally a relief for him, the few times when he got to be alone, but tonight he felt strangely disappointed. Had he started to look forward to seeing her face every night, even as guarded and haunted by grief as it was these days? In that case, he would have to winnow down the amount of time being spent together. She was going to leave sometime, like she had before. It was masochistic to start relying on the light of her presence like that. 

His revery however was suddenly interrupted by a small thud. He turned sharply to see Lily leaning into the doorway of the kitchen for support. Her hair was tangled and she had strange glassy look in her eyes. 

“Sev?” the sound was small and plaintive, almost mouse-like. 

He stood up quickly, his chair scraping against the linoleum floor. “What?”

“I…” She trailed off, looking confused. And then as if some new thought suddenly struck her, she giggled. Her body sagged against the doorway lintel before she slowly swiveled her eyes back to him, unfocused and her jaw slack. She was drunk. Firewhiskey or wine, he wondered, or had she gone out and gotten something? He sat down, relieved, though uncertain what he was relieved about. Perhaps that someone had not kidnapped her and replaced her with some stranger who had drunk Polyjuice Potion.

“Sevvvvv,” she cooed, dragging out his name and giggling some more. At least the alcohol was making her happier instead of making her cry. Or angry. He pulled open the chair beside him at the table and motioned her towards it. She tottered over and slunk down into it, her chin on her hands which were flat against the kitchen table. Her brilliant green eyes met his black ones.

They were fifteen again, on the dirty river bank not far from where they now sat. Lily’s red hair shone brilliant in the summer sun, as they giggled and dived into a large bush, trying to get out of sight of Petunia. Sev brought the half drunk bottle of whiskey they had snuck out of Lily’s parents’ liquor cabinet out of his large, dark coat and put a finger to his lips. Lily, already sloshed after only a couple of fingers of the whiskey, just giggled in response. 

“I know you two are in there! I’ll-I’ll tell dad what you’ve done!” Petunia called petulantly, with a quiver in her voice. She was too afraid of Snape to actually pursue them into the bushes. 

Lily just laughed another conspiratorial laugh, although trying to keep it in by covering her mouth. She flung herself down onto the ground with a sigh as they heard the sound of Petunia’s retreat. Snape nestled himself down into the dirt beside her and they both stared up at the sunlight filtering through the thicket of green leaves above them.

“I wish it could be like this at Hogwarts,” sighed Sev before taking another swig of the whiskey. 

“It’s your own fault, Sev. You don’t have to be friends with Mulciber and Avery.” Snape had stilled some at this, but Lily turned to him with another conspiratorial smile. “They’re not as fun as I am, are they?”

Snape stared back at her, unsure what to say. He wanted to rise to the playfulness in her tone, but could not because of his anger at what she had said. Lily broke their eye contact and turned her head back up to the sky. She stretched with a soft sigh and ran her hands through her hair which was splayed out onto the ground. He watched the movement with a longing he hadn’t had enough of the alcohol to express. 

Lily seemed to have caught sight of his expression because after a few minutes her giggling quieted. 

“We’ll always be friends, right, Sev?” She asked, her tone uncharacteristicly solemn. She turned to him, their eyes meeting.

“We’ll always be friends. Why do you think we wouldn’t be?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know, I just worry sometimes. About you.”

A felt an unfamiliar warmth in his heart at the idea. He took another swig of whiskey. 

“Come on, drink up!” Lily cried with a laugh, all playfulness again. She grabbed the bottom of the bottle, forcing more into his throat. 

He spluttered but laughed in response. 

After the fateful afternoon down by the lake, the memory of that summer afternoon was something he had treasured as one of the last times they had been happy together. He thought by the softening around Lily’s eye that she might be thinking along the same lines. 

“Lily, do you remember-”

“That day down by the river when we got sloshed on my father’s whiskey? Probably better than you.”

He nodded and looked down at the table. Her fingertips stretched into view and before he knew what was happening, she had taken his hands. She didn’t look giggly or happy right now, but that was Lily for you. Mercurial. Especially, when she was drunk. 

“Sev, I’m glad it was you,” she said in rush. “I’m glad I got to see you again and at least, in a small part, become friends again. Thank you for telling me the truth. At the very least you’ve been honest. I only have two people I can trust now, you and Dumbledore. I’m sorry I doubted you, I did not know you’d changed.”

Snape felt as if there was some rock sliding slowly down from his throat to rest somewhere near the bottom of his stomach. She was so beautiful and good. She actually trusted him now. He felt a violent surge of anger at Dumbledore, unreasonable and wild. 

“Sev?” 

He tried to force a smile at her, but he just ended up giving her two grimaces. Luckily she was not in a state to properly analyse his face features. She just frowned, confused at him. 

“Thanks.” It came out like a growl. She still looked confused so he tried again. “You have no idea how that makes me feel.” Half-truths were easier to tell than lies. 

Lily blinked, still a little uncertain, but kept on, her voice quieter this time. “I keep thinking, everyone loses their parents, right? I mean you lost yours and here you are. It’s just a part of life you have to get on with.” Her voice broke at the end as she looked back down at her hands in her lap. 

“You lost friends as well.”

“Yeah,” she breathed, eyes still down, forehead contracted. The two of them were silent for a few moments. “But compared to most, I haven’t lost that much. I’ll always miss them, but I’ve got hope. For the future. Once Dumbledore says it’s safe, I’ve been thinking I’d go live with Tuney. Wait till all this muggleborn stuff blows over.” She lifted her eyes cautiously to his, like she had been afraid to say that till now. Perhaps she had and it was only coming out now on account of the alcohol. 

“Petunia’s will never be safe. Nor will you be welcome there.”

“You think you know Tuney, but you don’t. She’s my sister.”

“Whether she’s your sister or not is irrelevant.”

The creases in Lily’s forehead were harsher now. “God, Sev, can’t you stop being horrible for a just a single moment?”

His nostrils flared. “I’m being realistic,” He spat out, slowly, syllable-by-syllable. 

“No, you’re being spiteful. Like you always have been!”

He crossed his arms, and arched an eyebrow. “Oh? Weren’t you just saying you were happy to be friends with me again?”

Lily straightened, and looked across at him, eyes narrowed. “Yeah, I was, but everytime I think that, you go on and start saying all these horrible things to me.”

“Well, in that case, I am so terribly sorry that you had to suffer the affliction of my presence for so long.”

“Severus Snape, you know I don’t think that,” said Lily, regarding him coolly. He said nothing, and just looked at her with his black eyes. 

A few long moments passed before she exhaled and leaned back in her chair, relaxing. She swiveled her head around, examining the gray and brown kitchen. “Now, where’s the rest of the elf-made wine?”  
\---------------  
A few days passed after their interlude in the kitchen, and Snape saw relatively little of Lily. Most of the next nights she spent in her room or only came down to eat food or grab a book or two. They had ended things on an amiable note that night, so he was puzzled by the new frigidity between them. She was quieter than usual as well. He could no longer hear any crying or sobbing or much movement. He would be worried but, in the end, he trusted in the importance of seclusion for healing such wounds as hers, for learning how to piece yourself back together again until you could pass as a functional human being. 

On Friday night, he strode through the darkening grounds of Hogwarts towards the gates wrestling with how the weekend would go. Would she be as quiet and ghostly as she had been the past few days if he was there the entire day? Perhaps she would want to do something, go shopping or for a walk somewhere. Would she want him to go with her? Perhaps he should still come back to Hogwarts for most of Saturday and Sunday to get work done and leave her in peace. Strange, how the very order of the world could be in the process of being upended yet such mundane concerns such as how to spend a weekend would persist. 

The house was silent when he opened the door and stepped inside. She must have still been in her room. He dropped the pile of student essays that had to be graded on the desk in his room before returning to the drawing room. He decided on taking back up a book on Penworthy Hallstead, a 17th century potioneer he had been reading the other night, and to wait to see if Lily would make an appearance. After an hour or so, he got up and grabbed some wine from the kitchen, noting that he would have to buy more soon. They were already low again. She had probably drunk a bit and fallen asleep. That’s why she was so being quiet. 

He settled back into the frayed armchair with his book and wine, and his eyes fell once again back upon the tiny, crammed black letters in the monstrous volume. The glass was half-way to his lips when an idea struck him. What if she was not at home. He should check to see just in case. He grasped his wand from the small table besides the chair. “Hominem revelio” he murmured to himself. He did not want to wake her if she was asleep after all. 

Nothing happened. No one besides himself was in the house. The book toppled carelessly to the floor beside him as he stood up. She was probably just down at the shops. No, it was after eight, they’d be closed by now. The pub then. Snape was already striding towards his room to throw on his muggle clothes. The pub made sense. She’d been drinking and no doubt feeling lonely. If only he could find that bloody jumper! 

He froze his mad search through the mothy drawers of his parent’s old bureau and stared down at his hands, puzzled. They were shaking. How odd, that had never happened before. Well, at least not since he’d escaped Hogwarts and James Potter. He dashed toward the kitchen to swallow down some firewhiskey. He’d have to go as he was, he could not waste time finding a muggle jumper at a time like this. In a second, he was in the entry hall, flinging his father’s old trench coat over himself instead of his usual cloak. The trench would have to do as far as blending in with muggles went. 

He was outside and disapparating onto the high street before he could form the next thought. He tried to look calm and unhurried, but the truth was he wrenched open the pub door with savagery and stormed around the inside. Not a redhead insight. He banged the bathroom stalls open. Nothing. He was back outside in the cool night air before a minute had passed. Breathe. Think. 

Voldemort. He had finally come and taken his final vengeance on the Potters. Snape stopped, hands on his knees and wretched. He tried to calm himself with ragged, tearing breathes. 

And then it came to him clear as ice. If Voldemort had her, he would know. He would have been summoned. The Dark Lord always pushed him for information about their relationship, but Snape would have been able to tell if he was at the end of his patience with his own evasive answers. She had gone to Petunia’s. The only place she’d be able to find in a muggle phone book. He had to rest for a few seconds against the wall of one of the shops, the release from the adrenaline was so intense it made him momentarily weak. 

With a crack, he was in Little Whinging, running, ungainly and uncoordinated, robes and trench flapping, towards Privet Drive. He didn’t dare call out her name, but looked around wildly for any sign of red hair on a side street or in a dark yard. In a few minutes, he was in front of number 4, Privet Drive, staring up at the warm glow of the lights inside. Lily was nowhere in site. He was soon creeping around the house to the back garden, crunching the rich green grass Petunia was so proud of. The back garden likewise was empty. 

She must have not arrived yet. She could have taken a train and bus; he had no idea how long she had been missing. He slowly walked back out to the front. He had no idea where the bus stop was from here. He sat on the curb opposite number Four, determined to wait. There was no one around either to be disturbed by the stranger watching Number Four so closely. 

It wasn’t long until she appeared out of the darkness, long red hair gleaming in the darkness, walking quietly along the pavement. He felt an unpleasantly warm anger in his belly at the sight of her, so calm and normal, as if she hadn’t just risked her life or almost discovered the truth of James and Harry. 

Because of the shadows and his dress, she did not notice him blocking her way until they were only about two yards a part.

“Sev!” She exclaimed, drawing back.

“What the fuck were you thinking?” He snarled in a voice like gravel, advancing on her. 

“Oh for fucks sake get out of my way,” she sneered back and started forward. He caught her by both shoulders, holding her back from advancing forward. She whirled around, eyes bright.

“Let go of me”

“So is this it, Lily? This is what you’ve been planning the last couple of days? You know I actually thought you were mourning not planning some fool’s rebellion.” 

Lily’s anger was white hot. Her voice was so full of anger she was almost tearful. “It’s not a rebellion. You’re not in charge of me. Move, Severus Snape, or I swear to Merlin, I’ll move you.”  
His voice was cold and level in response “And how are you going to do that?”

Lily did not reply but pushed forward, past him. He swiftly reeled her back with an arm around her waist. She turned, yelling now, caution thrown to the wind, “LET-”

But Snape clapped his hand over her mouth, and pressed down. Lily’s eyes were wide, whether in shock, outrage, or both, he didn’t know. She writhed insanely in his grip, like a stubborn fish wrenched from its watery home. 

“There she is!” camed a shout from the end of Privet Drive. Snape, turned, still tightly gripping Lily. Three shoddily dressed men with dirt smudges and ragged hair were advancing jauntily down the street towards them, wands at the ready, uncaring of whether a muggle saw them. 

“Oy, mate, that’s our mark you’ve got there. Been following her since she got off the train in London, we got first right, ya’ see.” The middle of the three spoke with a thick cockney accent. 

Wordlessly, Snape performed the full-body bind on Lily and keeping his arm around her to prevent her from falling, turned towards the men. He was tempted to curse them right then, something especially nasty, but Lily could still see everything. 

“Unfortunately, she got away from you and I found her. I’m afraid I’ll be the one collecting the reward money for her this time.” He spoke low, still cautious, but his voice carried to the men who were now about a hundred feet away. 

“Naw, bruv, we’ll be the ones taking her in. I think you’re forgetting it is three against one right now.” The snatcher actually had the audacity to wink at Snape. 

“Ah, yes, not a fair fight at all.” He replied with a faint smile.

“Listen, hand her over now without a hubbub and we’ll let you join us when we have a little fun with her. We have this place we like to take the pretty ones before we give ‘em to the ministry for good. You should come and see.”

Suddenly, the man was on the road, blood spurting from his forehead, chest, and a gash in his leg. The other two snatchers had reacted reflexively to the flash of green light and were hurling disarming curses and as well as a few unforgivables at Snape. He slashed his wand through the air, here and there, easily deflecting them. The youngest looking one, hurled a killing curse at him that he deftly ducked. He turned on the youngest, advancing towards him. In a few seconds, he was on the ground, howling in pain. After silencing him, Snape spun around, looking for the third.

The third was across the street, on the curb of the pavement outside number three Privet drive. He wasn’t standing up, but was part of a huddled mass on the ground. It was Lily’s body he was on top of. 

A streak of light hit the man like a train, flinging the man backward and like his comrade, he began pouring blood from several large gashes across his body. Snape was by Lily’s side in two long strides. There were small cuts across her forehead and bruises on her elbows, but the most worrying injury of hers was the small dampness of blood on the back of her head and the dazed confusion in her eyes. The snatcher had undone the body bind, but she was still unmoving. Cradling the back of her head in his hands, he began murmuring under his breath. 

The faint sound of a siren whirred in the background. The door of Number Four opened, light flooding out across the lawn, illuminating the strewn and crouching figures. Petunia stood in the doorway, her mouth opened in a scream. Cursing, Snape pulled Lily’s limp body to him and disapparated to Spinner’s End.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you enjoyed this and want to read more then leave a kudos or comment they let me know care and want more so that's very motivating.


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